Word: screenplay
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...Screenplay by ALLAN SCOTT and CHRIS BRYANT
Directed by PETER FONDA Screenplay by THOMAS MATTHIESEN...
...American Boy is a funny, wily, eccentric and inventive movie about dead ends and dubious dreams, opportunities lost and responsibilities evaded. Director-Writer Charles Eastman (best known previously as the author of the screenplay for Little Fans and Big Halsey) evokes, in the character of Vic, the kind of wary protagonist whose abdication of personal responsibility made anti-heroes out of Dean and Brando, Fonda and Hopper. The film builds to a crazy, disorganized hillside ceremony in which the entire town of Buddy, Calif., comes to cheer its boy Vic off to the nationals. Vic sees...
Filmed in 1970, The All-American Boy is being released after a great deal of infighting during which it acquired a leper-like reputation in the trade. The published screenplay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $6.50) disclosed that, fully realized, the film would have been considerably longer and rather less oblique. Vic would have been blessed and cursed by occasional shafts of self-knowledge. As it is, Voight's performance consists of careful character shadings that can only add tone to a silhouette. In more concise roles, the supporting performances are sharper. Carol Androsky as Vic's sister...
Richard Bach, who wrote the original book, is much agitated over this film version, which has allegedly altered many of the "ideas" in the book and his original screenplay. The book has about as many ideas as The Little Engine That Could; in fact, buried under all the vomitous theosophy, it has the same idea. Ideology aside, the movie's casting could open up a whole new style of film making. Think of it: Pigeons on Mean Streets, about a bunch of tough young New York birds. Or what about a remake of Four Feathers...